Student Blogging: Rudimentary Structures and Thoughts

Like so many other flip class folks, Crystal Kirch’s blog is kind of a must-read for me: she does a great job of making her thinking and teaching transparent, giving me a jumping off point to think about my practice – all this despite the fact that she teaches math and I teach history. So when I saw her post last Friday morning about student blogging, I was very interested to read her thoughts. I started writing a comment about her post, and it was becoming a blog post in itself.

There are a lot of concerns about student blogging, and understandably so. First and foremost, issues regarding digital citizenship need to be dealt with in order for teachers, administrators, and parents/guardians in order to feel comfortable with students writing and interacting in such a public forum. The logistical issues for the teachers involved, detailed below, must be sorted out. What will the kids blog about? Will there be an audience for these blogs? There are a myriad of others. Here are a few thoughts.

My Setup for Student Blogs

Students will have individual blogs that will be utilized for my class (history) and their English class. (I share a common group of students with a math, science, and English teacher.) Students may do some blogging in their math and science classes, though I haven’t spoken with the math and science teacher on my team about their plans in this area. In regards to content, these blogs will contain more than just posts they write based on work they do in my class.

I have created a student blogs page on my class website that will contain a link to all student blogs so that they are accessible to my students, but also to parents/guardians, my administrators, and other teachers that want to check out what my students are blogging about.

Content of Student Blogs

Students will blog about several things. I am going to ask students to revisit their definition of history and of a history class several times (I foresee about five) over the two-year loop I have them as students. I hope to institute regular opportunities for students to connect current events to historical content we have covered, though I am a bit more fuzzy on what this would look like or who the audience would be. Students will also be blogging about their test-taking strategies after tests. I plan on asking students to reflect on what allowed them to be successful (or unsuccessful) on individual test questions and then look holistically at each test and figure out what test preparation strategies seem to be working for them and what strategies seem to be less useful (test reflection stolen from Jen Gray). Hopefully, over two years of reflecting on how they successfully (and unsuccessfully) prepare for history tests, my students will develop more metacognitive skills about how they prepare for tests.

Additionally, students will blog about their writing process throughout their time with me. We (myself and the English teacher that I share students with) plan on asking students to reflect on how they attack the writing process in the drafting phase – how they use classtime, office hours, outside of class time, and peer feedback (to be done through shared Google docs) – of their papers. Then, when their final drafts have been completed they will reflect on aspects of the paper they are satisfied with – and what led to this satisfaction – as well as areas of their writing that they want to improve on.

The goal of all of the last two blogging topics (test preparation strategies and the writing process) is to get thoughts down on paper, so to speak, and have tangible evidence of growth over the two years that students spend with me.

Audience for Student Blogs

Who will these student blog posts be targeted towards? Well, hopefully several people. I hope that parents and guardians find them interesting and informative. I am hoping, though, to build a student audience, composed initially of their peers, for these posts. I envision sending students out to read over the blog posts of their peers’ to gain insight into the writing or test-taking process. Hopefully, a culture of reading and commenting on each other’s posts can be created this way. To help build this commenting culture around the writing process, we (myself and the English teacher I partner with) are going to create writing groups for our students. These are the people that rough drafts will be shared with. Also, there will be follow-up assignments after the initial and final writing blog posts to go and read and comment on the posts of your writing group. Though this is a somewhat forced audience, I am hopeful that this will help to ritualize reading the blogs of others.

Additionally, the folks who have undertaken the Blank White Page (BWP) project have discussed using a shared hashtag for use to alert our students to blog posts written around the project as well as for answered BWP questions. There have also been discussions around joint blogging.

These are only a few rough ideas. I do know that building readership among student blogs is important, particularly fostering a space for students to comment on the ideas of their peers. I am hopeful that I’ll stumble across more ideas on the intermawebs or the twitterz as well to help find ideas to increase readership for my students’ blogs, whether from their peers or from outside audiences.

Digital Citizenship

Finally, the elephant in the room: digital citizenship. ‘But with non-moderated blogs, how can you be sure that students’ posts are appropriate?” Great question. The short answer is I can’t. Here’s what I can do. I can make sure my students know that their blog’s URL will be linked in a very public place (my website) that will be accessible to the world. I am hopeful that this authentic audience will push students to moderate their inappropriate leanings and post in ways that will help them grow as students, not push the limits of common decency. I will also be doing work in class around building an understanding of the importance of digital citizenship as well as necessity for being responsible with your digital footprint. Then, I’ll cross my fingers and tell students that I trust them to be mature, responsible young adults.

Logistical Issues/Moderation of Blogs

Given the setup I outlined above – individual student blogs – I don’t plan on moderating content of comments on my students’ blogs. Will I peruse student blogs? Yes. Will I grade some – not all – student posts? Yes. If issues of poor judgment arise, they will be dealt with on a case-by-case basis. I do believe, though, that given the instruction my students will receive around digital citizenship, I will have a small number of (and hopefully no) incidents.

How will I know if students have done the blog posts? Google Forms to the rescue! I will create a Google form for each blog post that my student write with the following things: Lastname, Firstname, period, URL of the new post (not of their blog – this will require some direction), and the most interesting/important 3-5 sentences of each post. This accountability measure is easy to maintain, and the collected 3-5 sentence snippets of student posts could lead to some cool lessons – Wordle comes immediately to mind.

However, I am by no means an expert on any of this. What’d I forget? What have you tried that has worked for you? Where am I going to run into trouble?

Reflections on Year 4: Changes for Year 5

As I look back on my first four years in the classroom, like every teacher, I have had success and failures. For every Socratic discussion where I could sit and listen to kids think and create meaning together – sometimes without saying a word for 60 minutes – there has been an also present inability to reach kids, an inability to eliminate the achievement gap in my classroom. However, looking back on my four official teaching years, and this past year in particular, my biggest struggle involved a seeming malaise that ran through many of my students that precluded them from really trying to reach their potential in my classroom.

So, how to go about building a culture where students know that their best is expected at all times? That there is not a time when it is okay for them to just skate by and do average work? To start with, it deals with my expectations of their use of classtime. I believe that I need to be clear about what the expected standard of behavior and participation is in my class – which I think I do an okay job at – but also be certain to hold all students to this bar of acceptable behavior every day, from the moment they enter my class to the time they leave it. Not just on days when I am well rested, or in a good mood, or full of energy. Every day, every student, every minute they are in my classroom. This will certainly be a challenge to enforce all the time, with the all the time being the important part. However, if I can provide meaningful time for thought, exploration, and collaboration while my students are in my classroom, then I believe that I will be closer to reaching this goal of creating a culture where the best from everyone – myself included – is expected every day. And I need to be sure to hold all students to that standard all the time.

I will also allow more time at the beginning of a unit for students to wrestle with an essential question. A brief note to differentiate essential questions from unit questions: unit questions are more specific in referencing, in my case, a historical time period, while essential questions are asked broadly about the big ideas of a unit. For instance, an essential question for a unit on imperialism might ask, “What is the best way for an oppressed people to try to gain their freedom?” while the unit question would ask, “What is the best way for an imperialized people to try to gain freedom?” By giving students time to work around these more general big ideas and questions from a unit, and doing it collaboratively, I hope to have students both activating relevant schema they have regarding the big ideas from the essential question while also allowing time for kids to teach each other and build each other’s schema around the ideas a given unit is based around.

On a different note, I will never lecture about historical content ever again. This will become a post later, but through the exposure I’ve had to the ideas behind the flipped classroom this year I believe that my classtime can be better used for other things than lecture. Hopefully, this will open up even more space for historical exploration and creation within my classroom, as well as more time to connect the ideas of a unit to current events. These ideas of a flipped classroom as well as the time for students to actively and collaboratively explore the big ideas of a unit were based on time I got to spend learning from Ramsey Musallam about both flipped classrooms, but also his ideas on Explore-Flip-Apply framework for a flipped classroom (the Explore section, as I currently envision it, is the previous paragraph).

I also plan on consistently giving students as much choice as possible in how they express knowledge to me. Will I still be emphasizing learning how to write in some of my assessments? For certain. More on that – and the changes my Humanities partner and I are planning – in the next paragraph. I had great success this year in asking for students to demonstrate their knowledge in any way they saw fit. When provided with a rubric and a general outline of the thinking I wanted to see from them, it was amazing what they were able to dream up. I look forward for more opportunities for students to be creative in expressing their knowledge.

Finally, the last big change will involve the writing process. Similar to in years past, the English teacher that I work with sat down with me last week and we plotted the scope and sequence of writing instruction we will do over our two year loop with our shared students. It is an ambitious agenda, but certainly do-able. Two big changes for next year: first, we will be explicit in the new skills that we are teaching in each of the Humanities papers we collectively assign. This will help our students to know what aspects of the writing process they are expected to have grown comfortable with, as well as which skills we are introducing. We are hopeful this will make more clear what skills our students should have developed early stages of mastery – or at least comfort – in and which skills they should still feel comfortable about struggling with. We will also be asking students to blog about their writing process throughout the year by reflecting on what aspects of a particular writing assignment they are proud of – with copied and pasted proof from their paper – as well as what aspects they are still struggling with.

However, the coolest part of this blogging we will be asking our kids to do around writing involves the creation of writing groups. These writing groups will be tasked with reading each other’s writing blogs and commenting on the progress they have seem within their writing groups. We also hope that this asynchronous reflective process will let students reflect on their writing when they are ready, not at the drop of a hat in class when we ask them to reflect on their writing successes and struggles. Hopefully, this will lead to more of an exchange of drafts of papers through Google docs and will help to push our students’ writing.

Rereading this, it seems like a lot to tackle in a year. However, such is life – if you don’t love teaching enough to really challenge yourself to improve your craft or the education of your students, well, I’m sure there is a more lucrative career option out there for you, right?